After having played this wicked and trivial thief so long that people began to say (as they say now of the creator of Rip Van Winkle) that he could not play anything else, Lemaitre startled the town with a new creation, utterly distinct from anything he had hitherto done. From depicting the most abject rascality he passed in a moment, as it seemed, to the representation of delicacy of sentiment and grandeur of soul in Alexandre Dumas's play of _Richard d'Arlington_, and again as Gennaro in Victor Hugo's _Lucretia Borgia_. Yet the wild dissipation of the man's life was never so great as at this precise period of his career. Harel, the manager of the theatre where he was now playing (the Porte Saint-Martin), was obliged almost every night to send emissaries after him to the restaurant opposite the play-house, where Lemaitre was indulging in monstrous dinners and was usually hilarious with wine. Harel, it must be mentioned, was a very penurious man, who never paid his people when he could postpone it, and whose meanness of soul Lemaitre delighted to excoriate. Often when dining bountifully at his restaurant, the actor being sent for in hot haste with the intelligence that the curtain was just going up, would cry, "_Diable!_ And I haven't a sou in my pocket! Here's the bill. Carry it to Harel, and tell him they are keeping me here as a hostage." Though grinding his teeth with rage, the manager never failed to send the necessary sum for the release of his principal actor. At other times, when Lemaitre had breakfasted copiously, he did not dine, but the manager's purse then ran another peril. His actor would arrive at the theatre in a carriage, after having been driven about for five or six hours "for the benefit of his digestion," as he said, but never did he have the necessary sum to settle with the _cocher_, and again Harel paid before Lemaitre would get out of the vehicle. At other times during an _entr' acte_ Lemaitre would disappear from the theatre, and when the curtain was ready to go up again could nowhere be found. "Frederic! where is Frederic?" the distracted manager would cry. Frederic was down stairs in the cafe under the theatre playing games where the stakes were high, and almost always losing. "Monsieur Frederic, the curtain is up!" the prompter would rush in to say. "_Ciel!_ What can I do?" the imperturbable actor would reply. "I can't leave here, my dear fellow: I must win back what I've lost." Poor Harel had to pay again. As the receipts of the theatre were large, he did not dare complain much of these forced presents of money: Lemaitre called them his perquisites. He had a profound contempt for his manager's slippery financial manoeuvres. Harel was really almost as eccentric in his own way as Lemaitre was in his. The history of some of his subterfuges with his creditors would make a curious chapter. One day he stuck up the following notice in the theatre: "To-morrow the